- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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a backwoods facility completely failed to perform the activity correctly. they tortured this guy to death, either because they are morons, or they are evil. pick one. but it wasnt the methods fault.
There was no way to perform the execution correctly. N2 asphyxiation makes no sense as an execution method – it will only be painless if the person didn’t realize what was about to happen or if they were cooperative. If not, it’ll mean the person will fight until death. They will be put in a situation of endlessly expanding pain until they can bear it no more.
The idea that an execution method is humane if it would be painless for a cooperative victim, ignoring the experience that will be had be an uncooperative victim, is just… really dumb. It’s incredibly dumb.
There was no way to perform the execution correctly.
Sure there is, fill an airtight prison cell with nitrogen on a random day while he’s asleep. People go out soundlessly to CO poisoning all the time like this.
Yep, except that has two huge flaws – first, how do you make sure he really doesn’t know its coming so isn’t inflicted with other kinds of torture like prolonged sleep deprivation (because sleep = death). Second, how do you maintain the spectacle for the onlookers that have bloodlust in their hearts, who these executions are designed to make happy?
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A human can only make themselves stay awake for so long, maybe extend the range toa month.
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Tough luck, the bastard is gonna die anyway? I doubt most people who want vengeance are as bad as the death row inmates who have murdered people with their own hands, most normal people can’t handle seeing death right in front of them. I don’t see this as an actual hurdle to getting it done.
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Dumb comment. The truth of the matter is, the person will just pass out if done properly. Is it a psychological horror? Sure. But it’s not “painful” like death by slow hanging painful.
I’m yet to read the article, but if something went wrong, it was not the method, but the humans executing the method.
“I haven’t actually bothered to learn what happened, what’s going on, or made any effort to imagine the situation fully or understand what people are saying, but I think other people are dumb.”
Go away.
Ok. Nice call out. Let’s read the article, then.
Edit: Done. I stand by my comment.
My understanding is that the feeling of suffocation is only due to a build up of CO2. So filling a room (or a mask I guess in this case) should not cause that feeling. Existential dread, fear, etc are obviously not affected, but it shouldn’t feel like they’re being strangled and can’t breathe.
You’re right though, in that obviously doing something inhumane such as killing people can’t be made humane. Its a paradox. And with our system specifically, I don’t think there is a way to do the death penalty “right” because the system isn’t just. Or even effective and logical.
The pain will come from the desire to not be killed, i.e., holding your breath and resisting breathing the gas.
Just because the gas ITSELF doesn’t necessarily cause pain does not mean the METHOD isn’t going to be immensely painful. Judging the technique based on how an unknowing or cooperative victim will perform is just so dumb when it is an execution method.
I saw other people say that later in the thread. Do we know if that’s why this execution caused pain?
I mean, we don’t even know that this execution caused pain. Pain is subject and the only guy who can comment on it is dead.
All we know is that the guy was thrashing around and then seized on the bed over the course of the 20ish minutes from administering the gas to when he apparently went lifeless.
But it sure sounds like it was excruciating to me.
It’s not dumb, they want them to suffer. People who come up with this shit like to pull wings off flies and legs of spiders and watch them squirm.
I think you’re confusing the victims of the inmate for the actual inmate.
No. I don’t. Funny thing they have those traits in common.
¿Por qué no los dos?
nunca atribuyas a la malicia lo que se explica adecuadamente por la estupidez
That’s bullshit, it may be a “funny quote” but it has no correlation with reality. I fear that people think this is an actual rule of thumb applicable to the world- it isn’t.
My man, the world is vast. Vast. So both can apply in the context of the whole world. There are a lot of evil people, yes. But there are way, way, way, waaaaaay more stupid (read: below average) people.
What was that quote again? Paraphrasing: “Think of the intelligence of the average person. Half of the world is dumber than him/her.”
Yes. But it’s not a rule, like Occam’s Razor is, but that one is moronic too so don’t even get me started. Funny != True (necessarily)
This murder technique is not researched enough and is obviously going off assumptions and not the truth of the matter.
State-sanctioned murder is never ok.
Never? All the executions that happened from the Nuremberg trials were wrong then?
I’m personally not shedding a tear for Quisling, nor would I have shed one if Anders Breivik had shared his fate.
Never.
Emotionally I agree with you regarding Nuremberg, and Breivik, (and while I know that Quisling is synonymous with traitor I don’t actually know that but if history, so can’t agree or disagree).
The state should not be involved in murder.
The state should not be involved in murder.
The state exists due to its right to exercise violence and murder to impose its laws. USA exists due to the violence and killings it made to become independent, and it’s not alone in that origin story.
The US government were involved with at least 467 murders of civilians in Iraq in 2023 alone. Almost all governments with militaries are involved with murder one way or another, putting the line at convicted criminals seems like an arbitrary ethical line to me.
I’m against capital punishment myself, but that mostly due to the issues of cost and the court’s inability to make correct judgments 100% of the time.
What are the chances that the preferred method for assisted suicide in some countries is “cruel and unusual punishment”?
Should we allow the state to kill people? No.
Is this particular method the least cruel/painful? I think that’s likely.
Is this particular method the least cruel/painful? I think that’s likely.
This method can be the “least cruel”. The coverage on this story kind of sucks. Apparently they didn’t allow for a way for CO2 to escape this he felt the sensation of suffocating as it happened. Had they done that or just flooded the whole room with nitrogen then it would be the “least cruel” method of execution.
I put “least cruel” in quotes because on this issue we tend to mash cruelty in with messiness even though they have nothing to do with each other. Shotgun to the upper brain stem (or something like it ) is probably the truly least cruel method. No time for suffering, consciousness just ends.
We could also just not do capital punishment but that’s not happening so here we are.
Where is it a preferred method? I think it’s approved in one country but is it actually preferred or recommended by doctors anywhere?
There’s nothing described here that is inconsistent with “he held his breath as long as possible”.
That is the major flaw with this method of execution. The person can choose to hold their breath and be absolutely miserable for several minutes before they involuntarily breathe in the nitrogen.
Ok. This is a scenario that, while obvious, didn’t think of before. Man, that sucks.
Show me an untrained person that can hold their breath “for several minutes”.
I probably could if, y’know, my life depended on it.
Me. It seems to vary a lot, but I managed to get 2 and a half minutes a few months ago. Most of the time I average about a minute though.
Pretty much everyone can.
Most people stop when it starts to hurt, but it takes several minutes of holding your breath before you pass out.
Please do just like, a hair of research before saying random shit like it’s true.
Smith began to shake and writhe violently, in thrashing spasms and seizure-like movements, at about 7:58 p.m. The force of his movements caused the gurney to visibly move at least once. Smith’s arms pulled against the against the straps holding him to the gurney. He lifted his head off the gurney the gurney and then fell back.
Fucking barbaric.
I have a feeling that they botched it if it was so violent. It’s also common for people to be given/take sleeping pills to prevent spasms.
No, that’s just what happens when you hold your breath for as long as possible
Spasms for holding your breath? Uh, no?
Give it a try while recording yourself. Don’t worry, you won’t die. Just have someone with you while doing it, for safety reasons.
https://www.scq.ubc.ca/waiting-to-inhale-why-it-hurts-to-hold-your-breath/
Beyond the burning in your lungs, the signals your body gets from your brain when your C02 levels are too high, include strong, painful, and involuntary contractions or spasms of the diaphragm and the muscles in between your ribs. At some point the spasms become so frequent and unbearable that you can no longer hold your breath.
Ok, I stand corrected.
Yea, it’s not that it was botched per se, it’s just that this is a terrible, torturous way to execute someone.
N2 asphyxiation is only “peaceful” when it is an industrial accident or performed on a cooperative participant (i.e., self euthanasia) – it just makes no sense for execution because someone who doesn’t want to die is going to be tortured to death by it. Forced to fight every instinct they have to resist breathing until it hurts so bad they think they will die if they don’t breath in, except they KNOW they’ll die if they breath in so they push on.
It’s really, really awful. It’s a really horrendous way to execute.
Forced to fight every instinct they have to resist breathing
That’s part of what I mean by botching it. It does require some bit of knowledge about how the body responds physiologically to various gases to prepare for it. I’m not sure if there’s a way to know for sure, but if they didn’t explain that letting him fill his lungs with N2 from the start instead of letting him accumulate CO2, his death would’ve been entirely peaceful. Also, making him fall asleep first would’ve guaranteed that he didn’t fight it. There are various ways of doing that.
Overall I’d prefer this method over any other if I had to choose. I just have a feeling that they could’ve handled it much better than they did from lack of experience and forethought.
But he didn’t want to die. If you don’t want to die – if you aren’t cooperating with the execution – it is going to be torturous with this method.
The attitude of “this is the way I want to die” is automatically assuming that you want to die. That you’re a willing participant. Execution must be presumed to have an uncooperative victim and the humaneness must be judged in that context.
Lot of people saying he should’ve just let it happen. It would’ve hurt him less. That’s unacceptable to say to a victim of violence in any other context, so I’m not sure why it makes sense to people here.
Like I said, there are many ways of making an unwilling person cooperate but there will always be someone arguing the contrary. Just because this didn’t go as expected doesn’t mean it’s a tortuous method. Some convulsing is expected but that doesn’t mean that the person was conscious.
I’m not for the death penalty but I’m glad that more options are being explored and I hope that this is used as a learning experience.
If I’m going to be killed, and I know I have no choice, I will choose this method over anything else any day. Maaaaybe I’ll consider a shotgun blast in the head, or being blown into tiny pieces. But nitrogen or helium seems like the best way to go - for an unwilling but cooperative person like me.
Yeah, they need to have the person breathing regular air through the mask for a while and then randomly switch it to pure nitrogen.
That might just create a situation where the person goes through all this torture multiple times as they hold their breath and experience the pure agony until passing out only to wake up and have to go through it all again. It maybe seems better, but it’s still basically the same torture.
Other than doing it TOTALLY unscheduled in the person’s sleep, I cannot imagine a way you avoid the horror of this kind of execution method. And it’s hard to even piece together a way you could practically implement unscheduled/in their sleep that wouldn’t result in the person refusing to sleep, with sleep deprivation itself being a form of torture.
Every method of execution requires the person’s participation in some way.
Once that mask is on and the nitrogen starts, you have the choice between dying in one of the least painful ways that we know of, or dying in one of the most painful ways.
I don’t know if this guy thought that he could find another loophole and delay his execution, but all he accomplished was making his last moments on Earth miserable.
Calling it torture is to say that he has no agency, which is obviously untrue.
It’s definitionally coercion if the only other option is death. You do not have agency in that situation. End of story.
The US is such a backward-ass country in so many ways.
As an American, America is a barbaric shithole im need of another revolution
It isn’t. Shut up. Go live in Sudan or Haiti for five years.
America has been ruining haiti since their revolution because the slaveowners feared the revolution spreading. it’s literally our fault, us and france
Ok? I knew that and that sucks. But it haa nothing to do with the conversation.
Obligatory:
The False Evolution of Execution Methods
Edit: wtf……
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, however, characterized it on Friday as a “textbook” execution.
The textbook requires cruelty.
At least they can just suck all the nitrogen back out of him if they find that there was a miscarriage of justice later on.
So the guy was guilty perhaps but we have to realize that what was done was a recreation of the Nazi extermination final solution. I fear this. It didn’t work as smoothly as they planned but it sort of worked. So will that mean that we will slowly accept this as normal vs banning the practice altogether?
For fuck’s sake. Are you telling me Americans, of all people Americans, are now too stupid to kill?
What’s with these crazy new execution methods? Just shoot the guy. It’s not like you didn’t have a hundred thousand cops trained to kill on sight.
Abolish capital punishment.
Because we’re uncomfortable with calmly and premeditatedly shooting someone. Capital punishment isn’t wildly popular here, it’s still controversial
They’re not accustomed to shooting actual criminals.
Any state that allows this should force the governor to carry out the execution personally
“Humane” execution isn’t good, not only because execution is bad, and the pretense of a more humane method is just sugar coating, but also like 95% of people in support of death penalty just want to see a human being killed, with almost all of them are angry at how it’s doesn’t involve torture. The worst of this kind legit fantasize about murdering PoC kids as bloodsport, under the pretense of “upholding the law”.
How did his victim feel when he murdered her? If this monster suffered for a few minutes, so be it.
The number of people who have been released after decades in prison after modern forensic techniques (e.g. DNA analysis) have proven the convicted person was innocent shows why execution should never be used. Better that a guilty person spend a life in jail instead of be executed than an innocent person be executed by mistake.
This case was even better. The sentencing jury voted to give him life without parole. The state appealed that and a judge overturned the life sentence to give him a death sentence.
Why do we even have a jury?
Violence begets more violence. Every time. Killing this person does nothing to bring back the woman they killed, and just pisses off even more people.
That’s your opinion. I would hazard a guess that more people support the execution of violent murderers than oppose it.
So, are we to be his equal? A society that feels comfortable killing its fellow human beings painfully. Or do we aspire to be better. To not seek revenge but merely to minimize harm done.
And does the 8th amendment matter anymore? Does it still stand? Cruelty as we execute surely must violate it.
